Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of the level of public funding for museums in (a) the West Midlands and (b) Coventry during the covid-19 outbreak.

Culture and heritage are at the heart of communities across the country, enriching the lives of millions. The government’s £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund (CRF) was designed to support cultural assets of international, national and regional importance through the pandemic, including supporting the levelling up agenda by preventing the loss of valuable cultural fabric from our towns and regions. The CRF builds on a wide variety of funding already available, including the Job Retention Scheme; business rates holiday for leisure businesses; a reduction in VAT from 20% to 5% for tourism and hospitality firms and the Bounce Back Loans scheme, and follows £200 million of emergency funding from DCMS arms’ length bodies for culture and heritage earlier in the year.

Through the CRF the West Midlands has so far been awarded £11,985,651 in revenue grants for museums, 24% of the total allocated to museums in England. 91% of applications in the West Midlands were awarded funding (20 out of 22). One museum in Coventry applied and is included in this total: this museum was awarded £15,800. The initial rounds of the CRF were designed to support organisations at risk of failure by March 2021, and we are working closely with the Arm's Length Bodies delivering the CRF to ensure we understand the sector's ongoing needs beyond this date. We will continue to make decisions about how best to deploy the remaining CRF in any future rounds.